


The Water's Fine

by kat8cha



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, for cap 2 and AoS, some spoilers?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 19:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kat8cha/pseuds/kat8cha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bobbi Morse, infiltration specialist extraordinaire, books it out of Doomstadt when S.H.I.E.L.D.'s information is dumped on the internet and her cover is blown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Water's Fine

When S.H.I.E.L.D. went down Bobbi was in the dark. She had been in deep cover in Latveria for fourteen months. She was supposed to be under for even longer but Bobbi wasn’t stupid, she was Doctor Barbara Morse and while that doctorate was in chemical biology she was pretty sure it could be applied to her people reading skills as well.

She’d gathered all the potential intel on Doom six months ago, she wasn’t expected to signal for extraction for another four months. 

Doomstadt’s citizens huddled in their houses, a handful sat around in outdoor cafes, Bobbi passed one off duty officer whispering to an informant.

“There is a spy in Doomstadt.”

It was all Bobbi needed.

Leaving Doomstadt when it was on lockdown wasn’t as hard as Doctor Doom hoped. Bobbi had enough contacts in the city that slipping over the wall was a mere matter of waiting for the right conditions and gathering supplies. Avoiding suspicion while traveling through the Latverian countryside was more troublesome, Bobbi’s accent was still strong enough to cause suspicion. She hunkered in barns and spent more nights without sleep or in the open than she would have liked. S.H.I.E.L.D. had two safehouses in Latveria, Bobbi bypassed both, she took a brief rest in a hovel she had prepped a day’s travel from the Romanian border.

Digging up the bundle she had buried two and a half months into her stint in Latveria took half the day, dying her hair and hiding the intel took the rest. She unearthed an ancient motorbike from the ramshackle shed and sped off towards the Hungarian border at about ten. Bluffing her way through the checkpoint was a matter of looking frazzled and soundly cursing her boyfriend in Russian. The guards were suspicious but it only took them checking Bobbi’s false papers to see that she had arrived a month ago in the company of a mixed group of backpackers.

Bobbi spat on the ground. “If I had known he liked blondes so much I would have died my hair!” 

She was waved on her way by the time the sun began to set with no intention to stop until she reached Budapest.

\--

It takes less than three hours once Bobbi reaches Budapest for her to find out what happened to S.H.I.E.L.D. Mainly because every café with a television is still tuned to the news footage, the newspaper headlines feature grainy pictures of helicarriers crashing, and every device with internet access is either watching footage or sifting through S.H.I.E.L.D.’s databases. She bought a coffee and sat down in a busy café to wait and listen.

An hour later she walked out with the numbers of two men and one woman tucked into her back pocket as well as enough money to put her up in a hotel overnight and to buy a phone. She checked in, took a shower, and plugged the phone in.

She slept as well as she was able, a few fitful hours broken whenever another guest of the hotel closed their door or walked down the hall. Eventually she rose for another shower (you never knew when your next one would be) and to make two very frustrated phone calls. She didn’t even bother to calculate the time difference as, if she didn’t go straight to voicemail, she really did not care if she woke either Clint or Natasha up.

You have reached the voice mail of you know who please leave a message at the beep.

Bobbi took a deep breath. “You better still be alive you stupid asshole.” She took another breath before exhaling to let the anger out. “I’ll track you down once I’m back stateside, stay alive till then.”

Her next phone call was just as brief and, just as with Clint’s, routed to voicemail.

“Natasha,” breathing out did not help this time, “what the fuck?”

Bobbi bit back a lot more, the line wasn’t secure and Natasha’s voicemail was probably being monitored.

Time to check out, then. She left the phone plugged in and changed into the last pair of clean clothes in her sparsely packed duffel. She was going to either have to buy more or find a washing machine.

“Should have thought of that before I made those calls.” She muttered under her breath before she punched the down button on the elevator.

\--

Paris is lovely any time of year but Bobbi couldn’t enjoy the view. There was still an ocean between her and her destination and her discontent grew with each bump in the road. Her identification had been questioned at the rail station in Stuttgart and her safety deposit box in Salzberg was being monitored. The news was full of dire reports of undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agents being exposed and taken into custody, several of the reports stated that the agents had been killed or were now missing. Bobbi’s grip on her duffel grew tighter with each story. 

A week into her stay in Paris she tracked down S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Paris safehouse. She found it both deserted of actual agents and being watched by Interpol and French officials. If Bobbi had been anything but the best of the best getting into the safehouse without being seen or having to attack one of the guards would have been extremely difficult.

As things were, Bobbi only found it mildly difficult. Her creep to the communications room frustrated her, when she finally reached it she was grateful to see that either the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who had vacated or the government agents who had investigated the building had left the door open. She rested against the wall and took a survey of the equipment, computers and phones had been left plugged in but turned off. She scooted over to a supply closet and carefully opened the door. Boxes of cellphones, boxes of earpieces and microphones, and the components for listening devices lined the walls. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, Bobbi began to deconstruct the shelves on the west side of the room. It was easier said than done, boxes rattled, cellphones and bolts attempted to escape Bobbi’s grip and the shelves were unwieldy. When she had enough room she set about looking for the trick to getting the secret door open. There was usually a panel of some kind, or voice activation but without intimate knowledge of the Paris’ safehouse she could only guess. Eventually she leaned her head against the wall and let out a long exhale.

The wall practically collapsed under her, panels rolled away from where her breath had hit and in seconds she had a doorway to step through. She did and slid into the narrow hallway that building schematics did their best to hide. An agent with an eye for detail might have noticed something hinky about the hallways and rooms but… well, you had to have an eye for it.

The narrow hallway led her to a ladder that she would have fallen straight down if it wasn’t for the glowing tiles triggered when she was two feet away. She took hold of the rungs and glanced first up and then down, both ways were dark as night.

“Heads or tails, Bobbi.” She muttered before she began to climb.

When in doubt, she preferred heads.

The attic was sweltering. Bobbi took a deep breath before she hoisted herself into the humid warmth. She couldn’t say she was surprised, the attic housed a number of computer units that were still running and if they were running they probably had been since the agents vacated. That and a distinct lack of air conditioning would lead to any room getting hot. She wiped sweat off her brow before taking a seat at a terminal.

Even the keyboard was hot to the touch.

It took seconds for her to access all of the information leaked onto the internet, which was both good and bad. Good, because it meant that her computer still had a working satellite feed, bad because there was so much of it out there.

Bad also because there was information missing. Most of the inventory of the Fridge, for one, 90% of Fury’s personal secret bases for another.

Not that she needed a list of those.

She spent hours in the room, hours she really should not have spent because every second she spent in there was a second she could be caught, the signal of her terminal spotted as she moved from shifting through information from S.H.I.E.L.D. to information about S.H.I.E.L.D.

Nick Fury was dead.

She’d known that, the news had mentioned that.

Maria Hill was alive and had made the transition to private security.

Bobbi knew that as well.

Natasha was working the cameras for the first time… well, since her stint as a model. Bobbi watched a few seconds of footage before turning it off.

Clint was in the wind.

Jasper Sitwell was a HYDRA agent (Bobbi couldn’t believe it but… there it was in Natasha’s report), Victoria Hand was missing (presumed dead).

Bobbi read through lists with familiar and unfamiliar names (missing, presumed dead, dead, HYDRA, captured, released) until it all blurred together and she found herself resting her face in her hands.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was gone.

“God,” she had to stop talking to herself, “that’s hard to believe.”

S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t have gone down without a fight, didn’t go down without a fight but… Nick would have had a plan. He was the smartest man Bobbi knew or at least the canniest. He would have had a backup plan in case S.H.I.E.L.D. ever had to be dismantled. So, somewhere, S.H.I.E.L.D. still existed.

Not the academies, they would have been infiltrated by HYDRA and raided by every agency in the alphabet. Some of the young agents might have got out, those who had mentors looking out for them, but most were probably being filtered into the training institutes of other agencies. Bobbi tried to remember the base she had holed up in after the Man Thing debacle, before Fury had taken her under his wing.

Prudence.

It took half an hour to discover the base had been raided by Maria Hill and a special forces team. In search of…

“…fuck me.”

Coulson.

Well, there was Fury’s backup plan. Now, if she was Fury and she was hiding a team of agents…

One of the monitors to her left lit up with an alarm.

Bobbi fled.

\--

It amazed Bobbi how stupid men with private jets could be. A little schmoozing, a lot of boozing, and Bobbi’s entrance into New York alerted no one. Her exit made just as little noise. Her safety deposit box in Newark weren’t being watched and, amazingly, neither was her storage locker. She got a fresh set of documents and found a walk-in beauty salon for a professional cut and dye job. Then she dropped off her rental car, picked a new one up, and continued to drive.

In Kalamazoo she felt there was enough distance between her and Paris and more importantly, her and whatever traces of evidence she had left behind. Plus, she was on the right side of the Atlantic now.

It was easy for her to infiltrate an empty office building and use their computers and internet, which was good because tracking down which secret base and where without tripping anymore wires was going to be difficult. Bobbi spent several hours (some of which was spent covering her tracks) investigating possible locations for S.H.I.E.L.D. to regroup. She found a number of companies who were snatching up S.H.I.E.L.D. (and HYDRA) agents, several message boards devoted to filtering through S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intel, and a handful of crackpots who claimed S.H.I.E.L.D. had been preforming alien abductions with the helicarrier for years.

 

It was only when Bobbi realized she should have focused on personnel instead of location that she made any headway. The Koenig brothers were three of Fury’s favorite gatekeepers.

And luckily, they were three of Bobbi’s biggest fans.

\--

It didn’t take Bobbi long to track down Sam Koenig’s number, or at least, one of his numbers. She hoped it still worked.

Bobbi listened to it ring.

“…” rustling? Bobbi glanced at the sun shining through the clouds, alright, definite time difference. “He-hello? Who is this? How did you get this-”

“Sam.” Bobbi interrupted, she bit back a grin because she had to admit she loved the little gasp he gave. It was nice to have fans. “Could you let Coulson know, I want to come in?”

“Yes, I, this isn’t a secure line! But, yes.” Sam was probably nodding his head. “I can.”

“Good.”


End file.
